September 2009 Archives

Things go from bad to worse for The Donald's would-be Scottish Empire. Tripping Up Trump took the battle to him, getting the eager New York public to sign petitions against his plans outside Trump Towers. They've got over 11,000 signatures online now, plus many more on paper.

More seriously, the P&J today reports that Aberdeenshire Council will reject his Compulsory Purchase Orders. He's bullied people so hard that even his own former supporters have given up on him.

You can see how rattled he is, too. He rang Rob Edwards up to swear at him last week. He also sent out a properly bonkers statement last night (full statement as a Word doc) which describes his vanity project to fly Americans into a gated community as "one of the few projects of national significance in Scotland". Can the SNP really stomach the anti-Scottish sneer in that attitude?

In it he also claims that Martin Ford's position was "unanimously rejected by the Local Council". Sure, I remember Martin voting against himself. That definitely happened.

Presumably if he doesn't manage to force these people from their homes, which is looking almost inevitable, it's therefore all over. He could of course compromise. Similarly, the Pope might turn out to be a secret Zoroastrian, I suppose.

I've come under fire in The Steamie for the most peculiar reason: my attitude to chess. David Maddox blogged earlier today about my love of other board games, including an allegation that I have a game with nuclear war as an objective. That's almost true. I've actually got two, Confrontation and War on Terror. And I'm looking for a third.

He's a backgammon player, which I regard as the finest board game ever invented, and I'm certainly looking forward to beating him, ideally for money. But I cop it over chess. He disapprovingly cites my comment that:

"Chess is a limited game which can be won simply by processing further into the future than your opponent."

I stand by this: computers now surpass humans precisely for this reason. Peter Hankins says:

".. the conquest of chess does represent a victory of sorts for mere processing power .."

The historical intertwining of chess and politics Maddox sets out is thereafter is fascinating, though, and he's right to say that strategy on the chessboard no doubt has parallels with politics.

I suspect neither backgammon nor chess is his real love, though. That has to be cricket - see how regularly he and Tom Peterkin defend the sport on the Steamie.

With that in mind I dare not step into the crease to criticise this ancient game. For instance, I would certainly be reluctant to associate myself with the comments of Gerrard Hoffnung, who once asked "what's that game, you know, the one where twenty-two men fall asleep on a lawn?"

Photos of some of their locations are here. The Greyfriars Bobby one is outstanding, but shouldn't that one have an Alex Salmond mask on it? The wee dog is famously meant to have sat on his master's grave for fourteen years. When Trump's plan for Menie fails, as so many of his others have done, the First Minister will surely be found grieving at its graveside.

The crucial vote on this comes next week. Will Aberdeenshire Councillors back the right of residents to stay in their own homes, or will they back Trump's latest clearances? Watch this space.

Taking it at face value, shouldn't he should be attacking Labour or the Tories instead? If you're claiming, however absurdly, to be as green as the Greens, those two parties have plenty of egregiously anti-environmental achievements to criticise first.

When the initial outrage at Clegg's approach faded, it reminded me of the old cliché: first they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win.

Are we in phase three already, from the Liberal perspective? The evidence around the world certainly is that Liberal parties (other than explicitly right-wing ones like the FDP) decline as Greens grow.

But of course it's not even about picking up actual Green voters. There's no-one out there who's decided to back the Greens but who somehow never considered voting for what a friend calls "the shark-infested custard". Those votes aren't coming back this side of some unimaginable Green implosion.

In Cameron's case it's a good message because he knows the Liberals are, fairly or unfairly, seen as cleaner than the Tories. And here you will find me agreeing with Dave: there is indeed barely a cigarette paper between the Tories and the Liberals on many of the major issues he raises, so you can see why he's doing it. It's also a version of the irksome Lib Dem barchart-type squeeze on their votes.

In Clegg's case, he and Vince want to take the party to the right but don't want to pay the price for doing so. Appearing to cosy up to the Greens therefore shores up his left flank internally. It's those who might come over to the Greens over the next year he's really worried about, people who can't swallow the kind of Orange Book dogma that leads Vince to want to part-privatise Royal Mail.

If this kind of approach was a real attempt to squeeze other parties' votes, then the BNP would surely find themselves a prime target. All the other parties object to their vote growing, so they say, even if Labour and the Liberals apparently preferred to see Griffin win than see a Green MEP returned in the Northwest.

Imagine for a second any other party making an explicit appeal to BNP supporters in the same way, though. It won't happen, because the message it sends is "we're a bit more neo-Nazi than you think". Not even UKIP want to get down and dirty like that. Instead the three parties of the soggy Westminster consensus just give the infamous dog whistle an occasional blow, even the Liberals, sometimes.

Incidentally, the BBC also got a failing mark during this weekend's shenanigans. Their web team posted an article saying "Green Leader Nick Clegg blah blah blah" (saved for posterity here, now updated here).

No thanks. If he has a road-to-Damascus conversion to true Green politics, though, I'm sure my friends down south would be happy to take him as a member.

This morning Nick Clegg promised "savage cuts" to public spending, and by nightfall it was becoming clear they would fall at least partly on students. Well, it's not a cut to abandon a spending pledge, but it will certainly feel like one to students and would-be students.

Apparently the pledge would cost "billions every year". When Charlie Kennedy was promoting the idea, though, the price was just £700m a year. At least one Liberal leader is clearly lying here, unless the cost really has trebled since then. Thank goodness they worked with us and the Nats at Holyrood to abolish fees last year - just in time, it seems.

The mood at Westminster is what. The big boys are having a discussion about cuts, so he's got to join in. They're equidistant from Labour and the Tories in principle, however contradictory that may be. If both those parties are tacking to the right and preparing to slash services for the poor, he'll have to be right in the middle of it all.

It's obviously too painful or strategically inadvisable for a Liberal politician ever to admit that the Greens and the Nats are mainstream parties. This is a stunt they pull with tiresome regularity, and I'm sure a hundred years ago they were doing it to Labour. Sometimes the media play along, as with this example on Trident.

This mantra about being the only "mainstream party" to oppose Trident, the Iraq War (which was a particular lie), tuition fees, etc, etc, simply decodes as a claim that Labour and the Tories are equally dire on these issues. Is that really much to crow about?

While the rest of the UK hasn't been governed by the Liberals since Lloyd George knew your father, we did have Liberal Ministers from 1999 to 2007, Ministers who made some of the most egregious and anti-environmental decisions taken in Scotland since the 1960s. Their specialities included motorwaybuilding and GM crop planting, alongside other hypocrisies like tuition fee renaming and ID card abstention.

Their 2007 manifesto had ten pages dedicated to the environment, although three of them were full-page photos of grass and snow and stuff. Surely this greenest of all the mainstream parties would have some achievements to cheer about from eight years in power?

Not much. In all this verbiage ("They may be only the tip of the morbidity iceberg") there are just two references to any actual achievements in this area:

* £20 million invested in "public sector energy efficiency"

* "recycling rates have trebled under the Liberal Democrats" (although what they did to achieve this wonder isn't stated)

To be fair, they did a bit better on funding marine renewables than their SNP successors, too. But, unlike the Romans, that really is the lot.

Contrast these baby steps with the massive expansion of the motorway network Liberal Ministers forced through. It's in the manifesto, albeit disguised as a pledge to "implement the current planned road infrastructure investment". Presumably they wanted us to believe it was just some minor frippery they happened to inherit.

For years I met English friends who genuinely believed that the Liberals had abolished fees in Scotland, and that they were like a more organised version of the Greens. Plausible, perhaps, if you've never been governed by them, if you overlook their lust for privatisation.

It won't wash in Scotland, though. I almost hope the English have to put up with Liberal Ministers. Perhaps then we'd start to see more pieces like this: the New Statesman's great exposé of Vince Cable, which points out he was just as enthusiastic a deregulator as those he now criticises. And that he was happy to work for Shell in the mid-1990s during the period they were accused of complicity in the murder of Ogoni activists (Ken Saro-Wiwa pictured). Enough said.

As Edinburgh's spectacularly inept Liberal/SNP Council does its simultaneous best to build and block the trams, the anti-tram hysteria is approaching the levels seen in Nimbyist campaigns against wind turbines.

The latest incident to get the tramophobes frothing is an accident in Dublin where a tram and a bus collided. Sixteen people were injured, three seriously. It's clearly bad news, although it's not yet clear whether the tram or the bus was at fault, or even a third party.

My dear deluded friend Calum knows already. He simply checked his ideology-o-meter, which is stuck on "Blame the Trams for Everything". Let's assume he's right in this case, though, simply for comparison.

How do the risks from tram accidents of this sort compare to the risks associated with the SNP's overwhelmingly preferred form of transport, the car?

They're curiously reluctant to tell us. SNP Ministers are so quiet about it that their summer press release on road safety managed not even to include the headline figure, just a percentage change. I wonder if this reticence can survive today's debate in the Chamber on road safety. I got the numbers, though, by turning to the Record.

And they're pretty shocking. In an average week, Scotland's roads see five deaths and close to three hundred injuries. Every nine hours, year-round, more people are injured on Scotland's roads than were injured in this accident in Dublin.

But is this incident unusual for the Luas, the Dublin trams, or are they a regular deathtrap as Calum would have us believe? They've been running since 2004 and Wikipedia reports just one fatality over those five and a half years. If there had been any more I'm sure Calum would have edited the page accordingly.

Let's look at another cost the tram-haters seem oblivious too. Pollution from road traffic kills even more each year than the accidents. The UK figures from last year are roughly 2,600 from accidents and 4,000 from pollution. And don't even start me on the climate consequences of their love affair with the motorway.

Every time I see the shocking chaos the Liberal/SNP administration have visited on Edinburgh it makes me furious. The Nats are mismanaging this scheme, then campaigning against their own chaos, and all the while frantically denying any responsibility on the doorsteps.

Their incompetence is putting people off public transport, while their Ministers allocate billions of pounds of taxpayers' money to support various unsustainable roads schemes. I've always assumed all the other parties here were equally out of touch on transport, but I'm not sure that stands up any more.

So, cycling: are we generally in favour? Personally I'm more into walking - I don't feel safe listening to music on a bike, and I like not having to lock up when I get there.

I'm passionately in favour of folk being helped to do it, though, and the provision of cycle lanes in Scotland is dire. Look elsewhere in Europe and see how dangerous it feels here, and how marginal cycling is to the planning process.

"CAPS is about everyone in Scotland who is able to, having the choice to cycle in their everyday life by creating safe, welcoming and inclusive communities."

Lovely. It's like we live in Holland already. I particularly like the fact that SNP Ministers won't be forcing cycling upon those who can't. But let's not sneer. There are plenty of good ideas in this document, in amongst the vague "promote x, promote y" stuff. There's even a long section on Encouragement and Incentives.

But check out question 10 on p48, right at the end.

"Should all road users pay road tax? If so, how much should it be for cyclists and how could it be enforced?"

Tax discs on bikes? Seriously? I know times are hard for Finance Ministers, but this is sub-Thick Of It material. The paper's subtitled "More People Cycling More Often", after all, not "How We Could Force Folk Off Their Bikes".

You might also say it's just one option, but is this something Ministers should even be considering? The front page of today's Scotland on Sunday shows that some consideration has been given to implementation, but the Government's spokesman's backpedalling hard. Incidentally, that's a curious metaphor: as I remember it, backpedalling does nothing at all.

They came into government with a list of tolls to remove and of bridges and motorways to build. The civil servants nodded, the building companies rubbed their hands, and the environment came last as usual.

It's enough to make one despair, it really is. And I doubt they'll ever do it. But think how much fun the protests would be.

Reading the political coverage in the UK press, it's the same old same old Labour versus Tory cage-fight, with a bit of Tory-lite or Labour-lite in third place depending on who's in power.

The election's always decided by a handful of floating voters in a handful of swing seats, they say, and right now the story is they're switching to the Tories. Except they're not.

Polls rarely tell you anything about the churn. If Labour are down 2 and the Tories up 2, what's actually happened? Perhaps that 2% moved straight over, but it's unlikely. Maybe 2% moved from Labour to the Liberals, while another 2% moved from the Liberals to the Tories. Some will certainly have joined the Labour column, even in times like this. 2% in that scenario is just a net loss, after all.

The closest you normally get to this is polls that ask about switches since the last election. Earlier this week Comres did just that, and the Independent reports the results here. More than a third of Labour's 2005 voters are now going to vote for another party, and of those, more are now voting Green than have gone Tory.

It makes sense: the disillusioned are likely to be those who wanted Labour to renationalise the railways or to stay out of foreign wars, and why would they switch to the Tories? It matters, too. If Labour are losing more votes to us that they are to the Tories, shouldn't they change their right-wing approach on these issues, rather than trying to stick to Blairism at all costs?

But this is a bit too complicated for most commentators, and for election night coverage too. Stay tuned for discussions that still feature that tired old swingometer. It's easier than reporting a true multi-party system.

It's a source of some despair to me that an increasing proportion of our news is just rehashed anniversaries. Nevertheless, I do want to mark a barnstorming speech given 100 years ago today in Glasgow by Lord Rosebery, the former Liberal Prime Minister.

He addressed "the business men of the city", and I have a copy of the speech in pamphlet form. Apparently over 6,000 applied to attend, and he was warmly received. But they would say that, wouldn't they?

Rosebery had gradually become estranged from his former colleagues, and indeed told the assembled gathering: "I have long ceased to be in communion with the Liberal party".

This was no exaggeration - the purpose of his visit was a full-frontal assault on the "People's Budget" presented by his former colleague Lloyd George, and specifically a critique of the Land Value Tax and Inheritance Tax proposals contained in it.

His language is intemperate, even if Edwardian English sounds so polite, and his anger is clear. Land Value Tax is described as "the violent onslaught on land", presumably making income tax a violent onslaught on work, and so.

He also claims that "almost all the value of land comes from what the owner does or spends on it", which is misleading in the extreme. It's presumably no coincidence that the richest person ever to be Prime Minister, the owner of twelve homes, would find much here to dislike.

And this bitter assault was surely nothing more prinicipled than the resistance of a substantial landowner to anything approximating social justice in taxation. He talks about the "persecution of land", neatly conflating the owner and his property. Was the land itself really to be hunted and punished?

The Lords did vote the People's Budget down, leading to a constitutional crisis and an election at which Lloyd George was returned with a reduced majority. The Budget then went through, but without its land value tax element, and the powers of the House of Lords were trimmed by the first of the 20th century's Parliament Acts. Rosebery had done his bit, though, on land value tax.

A hundred years later and it's back on the agenda, with Compass and the IRRV both taking a look, although the Greens are now the only party to support a version of Lloyd George's proposals (with some notable exceptions, including Labour Land & Lib Dems ALTER). SNP MSP Rob Gibson is also a supporter.

Sooner or later, the shade of Rosebery and his peers will have to be lifted. It's hard, however, to take too vehement a personal dislike to a man who can send this self-deprecating telegram to the pamphlet's publisher.

Regular readers will know that I am not a huge fan of the Liberals in Parliament. They are, to my mind, the only group without a clear purpose beyond their own re-election, and their campaigning tactics are annoying to say the least.

Similarly, Liberal Transport Ministers (including the current leader) rammed through and continue to support massively unsustainable and inappropriate roads schemes like the M74 and the Aberdeen Western Peripheral.

More recently, the party's support for Trump flew in the face of their claims on the environment, and the treatment of Martin Ford and the others by both the local and the national party over this issue was profoundly troubling.

And yet, and yet.

If you read Scotland's top two Liberal bloggers, Stephen and Caron, you find an awful lot more sense, and on most of the key issues of the day they take a far "greener" line than their party. Here's a few examples:

On Trump's Compulsory Purchase Orders: Another spot on post from Stephen here

The most curious missing element, to my mind, is some divergence from their party on the road-building programme - I looked for any scepticism towards either the Aberdeen Western Peripheral or the unnecessary Extra Forth Bridge, but found none.

Even so, are you good people not barking up the wrong tree (pictured)? Are you really in the right party? I'm tempted to send you both a Green membership form, even though I know tribal loyalties are hard to shift. Added incentive, though: you'd both be in the same party as Martin Ford again.

UK Ministers' Climate Change Committee, also the Scottish Government's advisors, have today published some maths which should make both lots of Ministers think again.

Both are committed to 80% emissions reductions by 2050, yet both support unsustainable increases in aviation. Both were told today that all other sectors must make 90% reductions if aviation is to be allowed to grow.

Apologists for limitless flying (typically former "lefties" of one sort or another) always say it's just 1% of UK emissions, even as they lobby for massive increases. The Committee says that, at this rate it is likely to become 15-20% of all emissions by 2050.

These same people also claim that saving the world is an attack on the poor, as if budget airlines are actually full of folk on the breadline. One study showed that the richest 24% of the population took 40% of budget flights, while the poorest 32% took less than 8% (nef, pdf, p.5).

The first thing that needs to happen is that both UK and Scottish Governments must abandon their plans for airport expansion. Heathrow's Runway 3 is the most totemic example, but the second National Planning Framework, nodded through by dozy opposition parties here, includes expansion plans for Edinburgh, Glasgow, Prestwick and Aberdeen airports. It also mentions scope to expand the airports in Dundee and Inverness.

Check out page 109 of that NPF2 document. At least it admits that there'll be a carbon impact. Normally when Scottish Ministers propose something spectacularly unsustainable, they jig the figures to claim it'll reduce emissions.

I'd settle for some honesty here, though, from Ministers. If they said "look, we don't care about emissions and climate change and we're going to continue flying", that'd be fine: we could contest the issue directly with them. Right now green-minded members of the public hear Ministers saying they care and they may assume they mean it. It's the raging, gargantuan hypocrisy in Victoria Quay and Whitehall that bugs me most.

Over the weekend the SNP kindly provided me with the final breakdown of the Holyrood poll they gave to Political Betting.

Curiously, their release says Others: 14%, although the maths suggests 15%. A rounding issue, you say?

Well, the full numbers show us and the other "others" adding up to 16%. Make of that what you will.

Constituency

SNP: 36%

Labour: 28%

Tory: 16%

Liberal: 14%

Other: 7%

Regional

SNP: 30%

Labour: 26%

Tory: 17%

Liberal: 12%

Green: 7%

SSP: 4%

Solidarity: 1%

Other Other: 4%

Where we are, each percentage point means an awful lot - 6.7% in 2003 returned seven Green MSPs, but 4% last time took us down to 2 MSPs. Each additional percentage point on this poll would add one or sometimes two more Green MSPs. Run through Weber Shandwick's helpful but clunky predictor, the seats would look like this (usual "bit of fun" caveat applies):

SNP: 45 (-1)

Labour: 38 (-8)

Tory: 22 (+5)

Liberal: 15 (-1)

Green: 7 (+5)

SSP (!): 2 (+2)

Shades of 2003 in there, then: a bit more rainbow, both the main parties going down, plus the Tories breaking away into a clear third place.

There are plenty of other caveats, though. First, it looks a bit implausible. My instincts are normally wrong with these things, but I struggle to see the Nats going down in the current climate, while Labour's vote barely correlates with their competence and so remains more robust than you might expect.

Up to 22 is a lot for the Tories, who would need to take Eastwood (sorry Ken) and additional list seats in Central, Highland and Islands, Lothians and Northeast. And 2 SSP MSPs again? I just don't see it in 2011.

Next, the boundaries have changed, and the predictor works on the old ones. In some cases this works with those predictions. Eastwood is being chopped up, making Ken Macintosh's job all the harder and another Tory more likely, and the'yre also helped in the Northeast by the changes. Beyond that, it's too speculative for me. I'll let the inimitable MacNumpty, master of boundaries, have a go if he feels like it.

My second favourite game with these polls is Fantasy Coalitions. Assuming those numbers, here's how to get to 65.

1. SNP/Labour. Don't think we're ready for the Grand Coalition.

2. SNP/Tory. A narrow 67, but the only plausible two-party majority. Even less likely assuming a Cameron government at Westminster.

3. SNP/Liberal/Green. Honestly, if we were going to do this I think we'd have done it in 07.

4. Labour/Tory/Liberal. The Younionisht Conshpirashy writ large!

5. Labour/Tory/Green. If the CDU/CSU, FDP, Green coalition in Germany had happened, it would have been the Jamaican coalition, and a total nightmare besides. This would be a Holyrood Gambian coalition, and equally unpalatable.

My money would be on a continued SNP minority government with those numbers, though, with the Tories perhaps in some kind of confidence and supply arrangement.

Although UKIP only got 3% last time in the seat, this will effectively be a one-on-one cage match, no Labour, no Liberals, and only a disowned Tory to take on.

I think Farage will win, too, because Bercow's base is now the Parliamentary Labour Party, who don't have much influence in Buckingham. Here's who that'll be bad for.

1. The Tories. They don't realise it yet, but UKIP are to them as we are to the Liberals - why have the diet Tory version when you can have the full-fat UKIP? As soon as they win a seat at Westminster, they become much more credible and they start eating the Tories' lunch. LibCon has a series of links which illustrates how their hatred for Bercow has blinded them to the tactical cost of losing this seat to Farage.

2. Labour. They thought they'd installed a nice sympathetic Speaker as part of their legacy. Now it looks like Opposition could be a lot more uncomfortable. The consolation here is longer term - a divided right works in their favour: could this push against their most recent briefings in favour of AV?

3. The Liberals. It's a lesser problem for them, not least because they won't lose many votes to UKIP outside the south west of England. However, an interesting small party story like this reduces the benefit to them of the broadcasters' substantial pro-Liberal bias during election time.

4. Greens. See the Liberals - plus until now the media had been convinced that the only party to make the Westminster breakthrough next time would be us, via Caroline Lucas's candidacy in Brighton Pavilion. While our colleagues there more than doubled the Green vote to 22% in 2005, that's still a tough three-way fight with Labour and the Tories.

5. The BNP. Here's some actual silver lining. They fish in the same extraordinarily crowded right-wing pool down south, and more UKIP may mean less of your actual fash. However, having someone as generally smooth as Farage making BNP-lite talking points is probably bad news even here in the long run.

Oh, and John Bercow himself. Spare a thought for him. He's just got through a bruising election to become Speaker, and one of the perks of the job is normally not having to fight elections (yes, I know the Nats fought Glasgow North East). Now he's got a tough job to hold his seat. I'm not sure Buckingham folks will think it's clearly the best thing for them to have the Speaker represent them.

If it's any consolation, though, he's already sure not to be the shortest-serving Speaker in history. John Cheyne served just eight days, apparently, in 1399.

The elder of the Miliband brothers gave an interview to Today this morning (iPlayer, from about 1:50) about the Megrahi affair, and his line was very different from that used by Labour in the Scottish Parliament. If they'd been listening, you would probably have heard their palms slapping their foreheads.

The Foreign Secretary has bigger worries than this morning's debate at Holyrood - notably, can we stay friends with the Americans and the Libyans and fend off Dave Cameron? The best way to do that is to be resolute that this was a decision for the Scottish Government, UK Ministers have clearly decided. In doing so, though, he went quite a bit further than that:

"There was no way for us to control Megrahi's fate, we had to live with the decision but we didn't have to make the decision. The decision to make was for the Scottish Government, and they have done so in a way which we respect, but which is absolutely according to the constitution of this country."

Subsequently, he went on to say:

"Was the Scottish administration doing its constitutional duty in the right way? Point one: yes. Secondly, were they interfered with by the British Government in any way? No. Thirdly, was there a public or private dissonance between what we were saying about the administration of justice in Britain to the Libyans or to the Americans or to the Scots? No. And that is very very important."

Labour's view here in Holyrood is radically opposed, not least because, unlike UK Ministers, they care only about beating the Nats in 2011. They only agree that it was a decision for Scottish Ministers. I give you the first line of Richard Baker's repetitive and relentlessly critical amendment to be debated today. That Parliament...

"believes that the process of making this crucial decision was mishandled by the Cabinet Secretary for Justice"

It's not even that the left hand doesn't know what the right hand's doing. It's like neither hand even cares that the other one exists. Does Labour actually speak to itself any more?

Session proper started again today, and it turns out I'd completely forgotten what hard work is like.

I do occasionally get asked what I actually do, normally in a tone which implies extreme indolence, so to clarify, here's some of what today has included so far:

Getting a release out in advance of an event Patrick's speaking at;

Taking a look through the media monitoring note before it went out;

Arranging to meet one of my favourite members of Parliamentary staff about getting a Mac in the office;

Having a team meeting to look at priorities amongst forthcoming business;

Sending stroppy but entirely justified notes to civil servants;

Chatting with an SNP MSP who was returning a curry cookbook he borrowed three months ago but hasn't made anything from yet;

Drafting something to go into a campaigning organisation's media release;

Not eating pudding even though it was rhubarb crumble (pictured);

Getting a release out in which Robin welcomed East Lothian Council's decision to reject Viridor's proposed incinerator for Dunbar (and really enjoying being able to support a council for doing the right thing);

Listening to thin excuses from civil servants;

Only twittering a little bit;

Agreeing a piece on transport for later in the week with one of the broadsheets;

Discussing an amendment to the Megrahi motion with Patrick and colleagues;

Getting a release out in which Patrick called for a comprehensive inquiry into the Megrahi case and restated his support for Kenny MacAskill's decision;

Working up costings for a project we're considering;

Delegating loads of stuff to much-loved colleagues;

Winning a belated and partial victory over civil service foot-dragging through sheer persistence;

Summarising, with Patrick, our view on community sentences for one of the broadsheets; and

Not getting in the way of the man from the radio who wanted to interview Patrick.

I'd also forgotten how much I love session time. Seriously, if you get bored with a working life like this you're doing it wrong. Update - Yousuf has done his day here for comparison.

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Contact me by email: james at twodoctors dot org. Please do not contact me if you have some product you want me to promote unless it's an electric car and you've got a free sample. My blog runs on Movable Type, which is quite good, but dammit it's hard to figure out.